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HELP ME! too many errors in this book for a newbie..

hi folks, dear sitepoint-team, mr. lenz,

i bought your book "build your own ruby on rails web applications", and at first it was a great read, fun and understandable.

but to me as a newcomer to the mac-world, and especially to the unix-world, there are far too many mistakes / errors inside!!
it is not the code itself, it is the steps i am to follow with the terminals, consoles and the installation processes that are described in the book.

up to page 29 everything went flawless, but then came the mysql-installation, and although the installer went fine, the following steps that were supposed to work as described in the book, failed silently for me..

no explanation why.. i HATE it.. sorry..
but i feel left alone!

i mashed some infos from the mysql-website in (added another path to the .profile file), so i finally got the mysql-prompt working, but now i can not start the ruby-console, because i get an error saying that there is no rubygem or something like that!?

then i re-installed/ re-setup rubygems 0.9.0 as described on page 27, which also seems very strange to me!? do i have to do this everytime i reboot my mac??

seems like i had to redo all the steps to install ruby / rails / readline / rubygems on my mac. now, when i type "ruby -v" in my terminal, i always get "ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-25)" in return.
i can not get 1.8.4 to install again!?

why is that now?? please, how can i uninstall everything and start from scratch?

Forget what the book says for the Mac installation and use Macports instead. Note: you'll have to have Apple's developer tools installed. You should be able to find them on one of the DVDs that came with your Mac or your copy of OS X.

quasimono makes the point

quasimono is absolutely right. The book in itself is perfect but it contains by far, far, far to many errors. Not only in the installation proceedures but even more throughout the coding. Try the test routines in chapter 8 and 9 and you come close to giving up learning ROR. Especially when Mr. Patrick Lenz comments about how intense he searched the code for errors before letting loose the book. Sorry Mr. Lenz but try out your own examples in your book and I guarantee you you'll burn it by chapter 4.

quasimono is absolutely right. The book in itself is perfect but it contains by far, far, far to many errors. Not only in the installation proceedures but even more throughout the coding. Try the test routines in chapter 8 and 9 and you come close to giving up learning ROR. Especially when Mr. Patrick Lenz comments about how intense he searched the code for errors before letting loose the book. Sorry Mr. Lenz but try out your own examples in your book and I guarantee you you'll burn it by chapter 4.

cheers

TomTiger

only some test code is bad the rest of the code (the application code) is perfect and eventually i hope they will update the pdf very soon

Let me say, setup on a Mac is not easy. Ironic given the fact that Apples seem to have a bad images for being a 'dummy's / grannies' computer. You may find using Ubuntu on a networked PC (using SAMBA to share files to the mac, & remote desktop) easier to get up and running.

Problem in chapter 7 p.209

I must have missed something in P. Lenz' book on Ruby on Rails.
After having applied all the errata in my book with a pencel, I got as far as chapter 7 before my problems began.

Page 209: The latest changes in the source code (those applied in the beginning of chapter 7) does not give me what I see on figure 7.10.
I don't get the score (to the right) and I don't get the 'shove it' button below.
It is as though I haven't made any of chapter 7's up to this point changes at all.

Ah - I got it.
On page 209 of Lenz' book, I was a bit too fast to notice it:
Above figure 7.10, Lenz writes that I should go to http://localhost:3000/story
I instantly did that, and I was sad to see that I did not get figure 7.10.

But I was too fast. The url in figure 7.10 is not http://localhost:3000/story ... but *using* this page, I can easily get to a url like the one in figure 7.10. And yes, it works fine, just like the man said.

However, should others do the same mistake, I think I ought to answer my own question here on the forum.

Too Many Errors - Where is Sitepoint?

I agree with many of the others who wrote earlier - there are too many errors in this book and in the code download for a newbie. Even some of the experienced people who are trying to help are baffled! The testing code is the worst!

I don't know what to believe now, after what ppl had been writing here about this book. I was want to buy it too, but now I am concerned because in the end I pay so I can learn and read not to do more mistakes....
Regards Dan,

Any errors that are reported to us are added to the errata page and are corrected in following print runs. If you think you've found an error that is not already listed, please tell us about it so that it can be corrected.

Not to discount the problems stated by people in this thread, but I followed the book cover to cover without issue.

in regards to the book, I've noted some errors as well, and yes, more than I'd like to see, but nothing that made me stop in my tracks. there's nothing major just a few typos... if you're really understanding what you're reading you can spot them as you go.

finally, i want to give props to these guys because I've tried the other highly recommended books and this one by far explains it for newbies better than the others. the others I was following blindly and in this one Patrick explains everything thoroughly enough that you can really understand what's going on. with the help of this book I feel I'll finally be moving beyond the "newbie" stage!

in regards to the book, I've noted some errors as well, and yes, more than I'd like to see, but nothing that made me stop in my tracks. there's nothing major just a few typos... if you're really understanding what you're reading you can spot them as you go.

finally, i want to give props to these guys because I've tried the other highly recommended books and this one by far explains it for newbies better than the others. the others I was following blindly and in this one Patrick explains everything thoroughly enough that you can really understand what's going on. with the help of this book I feel I'll finally be moving beyond the "newbie" stage!

I followed exactly the instructions on the book to setup the environment for mac. Then i agree that the reccomended book to start with, "Agile web development with rails", is poor of explanation. I really don't like that book.

We've been investigating some of the issues with this book reported in the forum and via the SitePoint contact form and have made a significant update to the errata page. I highly recommend visiting the errata page and downloading the code archive again.